Roxy Character Analysis

From Roxy’s manner of speech, a stranger would have expected her to be black, but she was not. Only one sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show. She was of majestic form and stature; her attitudes were imposing and statuesque, and her gestures and movements distinguished by a noble and stately grace. Her complexion was very fair, with the rosy glow of vigorous health in the cheeks, her face was full of character and expression, her eyes were brown and liquid, and she had a heavy suit of fine soft hair which was also brown, but the fact was not apparent because her head was bound about with a chequered handkerchief and the hair was concealed under it. Her face was shapely, intelligent, and comely—even beautiful. She had an easy, independent carriage—when she was among her own caste—and a high and ‘sassy’ say withal; but, of course, she was meek and humble enough where white people were.

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and, by a fiction of law and custom, a negro. He had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white comrade; but even the father of the white child was able to tell the children apart—little as he had commerce with them—by their clothes: for the white babe wore ruffled soft muslin and a coral necklace, while the other wore merely a coarse tow-linen shirt which barely reached to its knees, and no jewellery.

“Oh, I got to kill my chile, dey ain’t no yuther way,—killin’ him wouldn’t save de chile fum goin’ down de river. Oh, I got to do it, yo’ po’ mammy’s got to kill you to save you, honey”—she gathered her baby to her bosom, now, and began to smother it with caresses […].

She saw her darling gradually cease from being her son, she saw that detail perish utterly; all that was left was her master—master, pure and simple, and it was not a gentle mastership either. She saw herself sink from the sublime height of motherhood to the sombre deeps of unmodified slavery. The abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete.

She put the vile side of him out of her mind, and dwelt only on the recollections of his occasional acts of kindness to her. She gilded and otherwise decorated these, and made them very pleasant to contemplate. She began to long to see him. She would go and fawn upon him, slave-like—for this would have to be her attitude, of course—and maybe she would find that time had modified him, and that he would be glad to see his long-forgotten old nurse and treat her gently.

Roxy had for so many days nourished and fondled and petted her notion that Tom would be glad to see his old nurse, and would make her proud and happy to the marrow with a cordial word or two, that it took two rebuffs to convince her that he was not funning, and that her beautiful dream was a fond and foolish vanity, a shabby and pitiful mistake. She was hurt to the heart, and so ashamed that for a moment she did not quite know what to do or how to act. Then her breast began to heave, the tears came, and in her forlornness she was moved to try that other dream of hers—and appeal to her boy’s charity.

This was a two-storey log house which had acquired the reputation a few years before of being haunted, and that was the end of its usefulness. Nobody would live in it afterward, or go near it by night, and most people even gave it a wide berth in daytime. As it had no competition, it was called the haunted house. It was getting crazy and ruinous, now, from long neglect. It stood three hundred yards beyond Pudd’nhead Wilson’s house, with nothing between but vacancy. It was the last house in the town at that end.

“Does I mine tellin’ you? No, dat I don’t! You ain’t got no ‘casion to be shame’ o’ yo’ father, I kin tell you. He wuz de highest quality in dis whole town—ole Virginny stock. Fust famblies, he wuz. Jes as good stock as de Driscolls en de Howards, de bes’ day dey ever seed.”

“Caesar’s ghost!” commented Tom, with astonishment. “It beats anything that was ever heard of! Why, a man’s own hand is his deadliest enemy! Just think of that—a man’s own hand keeps a record of the deepest and fatalest secrets of his life, and is treacherously ready to expose him to any black-magic stranger that comes along.”

Roxana poured out endearments upon him, to which he responded uncomfortably, but as well as he could. And she tried to comfort him, but that was not possible. These intimacies quickly became horrible to him, and within the hour he began to try to get up courage enough to tell her so, and require that they be discontinued or very considerably modified. But he was afraid of her; and besides, there came a lull now, for she had begun to think. She was trying to invent a saving plan. Finally she started up, and said she had found a way out. Tom was almost suffocated by the joy of this sudden good news.

By agreement, the conversation in Roxy’s presence was all about the man’s ‘upcountry’ farm, and how pleasant a place it was, and how happy the slaves were there; so poor Roxy was entirely deceived, and easily, for she was not dreaming that her own son could be guilty of treason to a mother who, by voluntarily going into slavery—slavery of any kind, mild or severed, or of any duration, brief or long—was making a sacrifice for him compared with which death would have been a poor and commonplace one.

“Sell a pusson down de river—down de river!—for de bes’! I wouldn’t treat a dog so! I is all broke down en wore out, now, en so I reckon it ain’t in me to storm aroun’ no mo’, like I used to when I ‘uz trompled on en ‘bused. I don’t know—but maybe it’s so. Leastways, I’s suffered so much dat mournin’ seem to come mo’ handy to me now den stormin’.”

After a moment or two he ventured forward again—one step—reached for his prize and seized it, dropping the knife-sheath. Then he felt the old man’s strong grip upon him, and a wild cry of ‘Help! help!’ rang in his ear. Without hesitation he drove the knife home—and was free. Some of the notes escaped from his left hand and fell into the blood on the floor. He dropped the knife and snatched them up and started to fly; transferred them to his left hand and seized the knife again, in his fright and confusion, but remembered himself and flung it from him, as being a dangerous witness to carry away with him.

“Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified—and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and mutations of time.”

The real heir suddenly found himself rich and free, but in a most embarrassing situation. He could neither read nor write, and his speech was the basest dialect of the negro quarter. His gait, his attitudes, his gestures, his bearing, his laugh—all were vulgar and uncouth; his manners were the manners of a slave. Money and fine clothes could not mend these defects or cover them up, they only made them the more glaring and the more pathetic.

Everybody granted that if “Tom” were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter.

As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river.